Apps that don't work? There's a government for that
The disastrous launch of the vaccine passport app is the embodiment of SNP failure.
Image: dmncwndrlch via Pixabay
Can this government do anything right?
Vaccine passports have been launched in a style now customary to the Sturgeon era — unmitigated shambles — and individuals and businesses have spent the weekend picking up the pieces.
Those who objected to this privacy-invading scheme had their concerns swept aside by an imperious First Minister as the Scottish Government did one of the few things it is good at: ignored warnings and carried on regardless.
As though it wasn't humiliating enough that, before the scheme went live, ministers had to announce an immediate two-week grace period, over the weekend health secretary Humza Yousaf urged that patrons unable to prove their vaccination status not be 'turned away from the nightclub door or turned away from the turnstiles'.
Bear in mind, this is a programme which was essential to mitigating the spread of Covid-19, or so we were told. Challenged on the wisdom of vaccine passports, Nicola Sturgeon said it was 'incumbent on government to take responsible, reasonable and targeted measures to keep the country safe'.
Incumbent to take measures, but not incumbent to make sure they worked before rushing them out. The First Minister loves nothing more than for Scotland to stand out on the world stage from the rest of the UK. We certainly stand out now.
This is hardly the first time the Nationalist government has fallen foul of IT gremlins. There were the earlier snafus with certification and the low usage rates for the Protect Scotland app. The hacking of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency at the beginning of the year, its holding to ransom and the subsequent publication online of stolen government data.
The 2017 farm payments scandal, which saw rural businesses in peril because of unprocessed Common Agricultural Policy cash, was down to a glitch-ridden £178m computer system.
Other technological travesties included the NHS 24 telecoms upgrade (budget: £75.8m, cost: £117m), the new Police Scotland computer that collapsed without delivering a promised £200m in savings, and the botched IT project commissioned by the Scottish Public Pensions Agency which the Auditor General said lacked 'a clear business case' and 'failed to provide value for money'.
The UK Government has its own sins to answer for when it comes to hapless IT endeavours but this is a blunder entirely made in Scotland. Well, except for the £600,000 contract to develop the app. That went to a Danish firm.
The Scottish Government wanted to go its own way and did. As the Scottish Daily Mail reported, SNP ministers snubbed an opportunity to be part of the UK app. They claim it would have taken too long to get Scotland's data online with the NHS England system, as though the pandemic was something that just popped up unannounced last week. One of the priorities from March 2020 onwards should have been integrating health data to enable the four-nation approach the First Minister claimed to be pursuing.
Everyone knows why that didn't happen, why this latest offer was rebuffed, why the Scottish Government finds every opportunity it can to differentiate Scotland from the rest of the country. It has a lot more to do with political will than technological capability and everything to do with a government that cannot go the length of itself without sowing division. It is petty and it is pitiful.
There is nothing wrong with being a patriot and, in my more contemplative moments, I might even concede there is a certain nobility and dignity to some forms of nationalism. But the relentless campaign to force a mononational identity on all of us is wearing thin.
I know the name of the country. I don’t need to be reminded of it every time I interact with the public sector.
I know what a saltire looks like. Not everything needs to be branded with one as if it were a corporate logo.
I reckon Scotland’s just dandy and capable of doing all sorts. I will not take it as a wound to my national pride if we share an app with people we’ve shared a country with for 300 years.
All I want — all I think anyone wants — is for things to work, and especially those things we are told are crucial to keeping us all safe. That is, in the end, the first duty of government. The SNP has failed in this duty and it will go on failing. Not because it believes in independence — after all, many Scots believe in it too — but because it is paralysed by it.
After the 2014 referendum, when the nationalists lost but saw their membership rolls and poll numbers swell, I thought the wise thing would be for them to park the constitution and spend the next term or two at Holyrood showing how well they could govern.
Instead of a battering-ram against the Union, use the Scottish Parliament as a job interview for setting up a new state. At first, it looked as though Nicola Sturgeon might do just that but she quickly remembered that she was leading the SNP. They weren't there to fix the roads.
I am as dog-tired of the constitution as everyone else and I'd rather not bring it up again, but it is unavoidable. I could fill an entire newspaper with original, clever-sounding theories for why the SNP is so bad at governing but the boring truth is that it comes back to what it always comes back to.
The purpose of the SNP is to achieve independence and so it attracts many for whom independence is everything, some for whom it is a means to other ends, but very few for whom it takes a back seat to good governance. That means a wide talent pool but just a trickle of potential ministers minded to put their talent to use on the quotidian business of bread and butter.
Don't expect them to be held to account for this failing, either. They won't be. They never are. There might be a hand-wringing ministerial statement, complete with the deathless pledge to 'learn lessons', or, if things get really bad, perhaps even a review of some sort. We all know where those lead. A government that fails as often as this one has to be careful about setting precedents on failure.
Vaccine passports are bad policy but they needn't have been a disaster. That they are is the fault of a political culture so fixated on the future that it cannot get a grip on the present. It is not enough for the SNP to dream of the Scotland it wants; it has to be prepared to govern the Scotland it has.
‘It’s not easy bein’ green,’ Kermit the Frog once lamented.
The anguished amphibian should have taken a leaf out of Patrick Harvie’s book. He finds it a skoosh to be Green, a shade of politics now indistinguishable from Nationalist yellow.
Harvie and co voted through the disastrous vaccine passports scheme despite their previous statements about the impact on equalities. The impact didn’t change and nor did the concept of human rights. What changed was two shiny ministerial titles and a seat at the big boys’ and girls’ table.
The Green sellout on medical privacy came the same week their manifesto pledge of a moratorium on incinerators was kicked into the long grass. Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton has warned them not to abandon their beliefs for a little power.
'I say that to the Greens as somebody who has watched his party learn the hard way that voting against the principles on which it was elected does not end well,' he cautioned. His words may yet prove prescient.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on October 4, 2021.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it on social media:
If you haven’t subscribed yet, hit the button below to get my posts emailed directly to your inbox:
You can follow me on Facebook here:
And on Twitter here: